Strafe Amazon is fun but really fragile!

Need some advice to improve her. Finished NM and now lvl 63. She has all the BIS gear and I guess I'll try to reach lvl 70 before hell. However, she's really fragile since life Investment is a little problematic (most guides suggest really little investment on life) and after getting one shotted by the Ancients, I decided to get done advice. And of course, resists are shitty.

What to do exactly? More investment in defensive passive skills or try to be careful till the lvl 75, at where most items could be on?

Would you detail what your current build is ?

Chains of Honor !!!

I have one in Hardcore mode, that works out quite well as for a priority:

#1 Resistances IF you can get the

Cap running fort this is what I would go for over Coh 100% ,though a 60/60/XX Life Jeweler's is also Great but not cheap at all and is only really useful if you are going to run

Windforce. Pay attention to what armor base you choose as there is a Run Walk Penalty that is not clearly stated but its -5% for medium armor and -10% for heavy armor bases.
#2 Faster Run Walk
#3 Leech for sustain ESP if you run multi as well though Guided spam for bosses can add up fast as well
#4 Ed and I value Min Damage over Max for this build as its better to close the average damage over total max, but this ofc depends on what bow you will end up using for the final build. If you go with the GMB Faith I would definately go for Min damage as the swing on this bow is quite large.
#5 IIRC the Ias Frames with the common bow types using Faith runeword are: 95% On Gear for GMB 65% on Gear For

Diamond and Shadow Bases, and 45% on gear for Matriarchal Bases as far as fixing you frames there.

Decoy and

Slow Missiles are your best CC tools, with enough Run Walk you can matrix out of alot of spam.

My Strafezon is my most efficient TZ Tranvical farmer because I can get in and out in under a minute. Gear and Mana/LL are really important. There are three weapons I've used that are really effective. The Cheapest is a

Witchwild String, the next which is a better option and still quite affordable is a

Windforce, and the last is the Faith which is expensive and roll dependent. You don't have to start with the best. A good start would be a Witchwild which can be bought with a few P gems or desirable low level runes such

Hel. It has two sockets which you can use to help you increase damage, reach break points, or both if you have the Jewels. A fast Witchwild will proc amplified damage often and if you use an Atama's Scarab it will increase the likelyhood of Amp damage prociing. For armor I recommend a Fortitude.

Here is a video I made running Hell level Chaos with the Witchwild. So it is a bow that will get you through Hell lvl where you can farm the things you need to upgrade if you so desire.

Yea hard to get specific tips without knowing your build, but

Valkyrie and

Decoy work well, you can throw on Peace armour to proc a lvl 15

Valkyrie with no skill points, super useful. Silkweaves and mana leech are really important. You could use a Hustle on weapon swap to get get the

Burst of Speed. Then damage charms are always useful.

I found a maxed out

Magic Arrow a great option when leveling

I dont personally like the strafeazon, with a torch procing the

Inferno thing every 5 seconds my frame rate drops so low it stops being fun, so I’m primarily running a frostmaiden and multi shot

Sorry for the missing info. She's now 63 and has Fortitude, LoH, RF ring on, Faith, Giant's

Skull with 15 ias jewels, torch, anni waiting. Inventory is full with ed, ar, life charms.

Strafe is about to be maxed, MS, GA maxed. All the passives has 1p. Currently using Harmony bow with +3 skills.

basicnecromancy wrote: 5 months ago

Sorry for the missing info. She's now 63 and has Fortitude, LoH, RF ring on, Faith, Giant's

Skull with 15 ias jewels, torch, anni waiting. Inventory is full with ed, ar, life charms.

Strafe is about to be maxed, MS, GA maxed. All the passives has 1p. Currently using Harmony bow with +3 skills.

Seems solid. At 65 you hit Faith, you should see a strong difference.
As for res, your charms should help, your second ring too (dual leech @res?)

Necrarch wrote: 5 months ago

basicnecromancy wrote: 5 months ago

Sorry for the missing info. She's now 63 and has Fortitude, LoH, RF ring on, Faith, Giant's

Skull with 15 ias jewels, torch, anni waiting. Inventory is full with ed, ar, life charms.

Strafe is about to be maxed, MS, GA maxed. All the passives has 1p. Currently using Harmony bow with +3 skills.

Seems solid. At 65 you hit Faith, you should see a strong difference.
As for res, your charms should help, your second ring too (dual leech @res?)

I almost always play solo online so what's your best armor option, Fortitude or Chains of Honor? I already have nice Fortitude but could also roll a CoH.

Fort is just too good for dmg to pass up imo.

Given the right set of gear, you can push bowzon per-hit-dmg to fairly crazy levels (regardless of whether you're looking at

Strafe or multi or both).
At the same time, you can typically get some amount of life leech (really don't need a lot) without going out of your way for it at all.

The combination of both, when built correctly, effectively means your life will typically jump back to full near instantly whenever it isn't.
As a result, all you really need to overcome said fragility, is enough life (and res) to not get 1shot. For most normal packs, that's achieved with capped res and 0 pts in vitality so...fairly easy (even on a zon, where res is def. harder than say a sorc). If you really want to eliminate any chance of dying I suppose you may want some pts in vitality after all but more often than not, you don't even need those. Unless you wanna run ubers and the like then some more life def doesn't hurt.

Additionally, once you reach higher levels of gear and said massive damage, you simply won't be getting hit anymore anyways as you can reliably annihilate anything and everything on the Edge of your screen or even off-screen (the latter more so with multi, seeing how

Strafe at least needs them within targeting-range). So at that stage, you'd be fine with literally 1 life and -100 res.

The only real exception to the above is bosses, stronger undead packs or simply put just higher life stuff that makes your life leech not work. That is then either solved by running/dodging more (extending fight time) or by going the total cheese route and using dracs for lifetap, taking you right back to effective immortality so long as you keep attacking.

Personally, I tend to keep my zon either as a full dex pure bowzon (perfectly sufficient if not to say OP for anything but ubers) or if I want her to be a true ezmode all-rounder (including ubers) she gets enough dex for max block with a shield/jav on switch (for

Impale v ubers) and then the rest in vita. The latter still leaves her with fairly solid dmg and with more than enough life (not using BO) to handle absolutely everything.

It’s a good discussion, i started playing a bit again with my frost maiden, with all her gear on she only has ~1100 life, just eniough that she doesn’t die when an enchanted creature dies and im too close

It is fragile but you can avoid being touched with gear like buriza,

Rattlecage,

Howltusk and

Cleglaw's Pincers. I had this setup with mine strafeazon and its a fun build. But this gear is for NM tho XD

Thank you all guys for the insights. I love this platform!

Heavy gear has been all covered here, so for my $.02 I mention some smaller items I use on my straffezon.
Amulet -

Metalgrid, it adds high percentage to all resistances and a heavy boost to Attack Rating and Defense.
Ring 1 -

Raven Frost for all non-

Nihlathak's Temple and Halls areas
Ring 1 -

Nature's Peace for

Nihlathak's Temple and Halls
Ring 2 -

Carrion Wind

mhlg wrote: 5 months ago

...really effective. The Cheapest is a

Witchwild String, the next which is a better option and still quite affordable is a

Windforce, and the last is the Faith which is expensive and roll dependent. You don't have to start with the best. A good start would be a Witchwild which can be bought with a few P gems or desirable low level runes such

Hel. It has two sockets which you can use to help you increase damage, reach break points, or both if you have the Jewels. A fast Witchwild will proc amplified damage often and if you use an Atama's Scarab it will increase the likelyhood of Amp damage prociing. For armor I recommend a Fortitude.

Here is a video I made running Hell level Chaos with the Witchwild. So it is a bow that will get you through Hell lvl where you can farm the things you need to upgrade if you so desire.

Luv my WWS - FA +

Strafe Hybrid.

Don't do past 1 P since i 99% solo with her so i'm not worried of the DPS.
Mobility is

Key and if nothing touches you when they stand there like icecubes..everything just shatters.
So Dex build.

Find a Perfect. upp it then sock it. Style points for the blue bow that could.